“Since , O Mazda from the beginning, Thou didst create soul and body, mental power and knowledge , and since Thou didst bestow to mankind the power to act , speak and guide , you wished that everyone should chose their own faith and path freely.”

Zaratostra - Yasna 31, Verse 11

“One who always thinks of his own safety and profit, how can he love the joy-bringing Mother Earth? The righteous man that follows Asha's Law shall dwell in regions radiant with Thy Sun, the abode where wise ones dwell.”

Zaratostra Yasna, Verse 2

Sunday, March 27, 2011

Abstract for the Symposium by Associate Professor Gocha Tsetskhladze

'Colonial Encounters': Ancient Greeks OverlandContacts between Greeks and locals come in different shapes and sizes andwere transmitted in a variety of ways - objects, ideas, practices,lifestyles, etc. - and different societies showed different ways ofaccepting and displaying new ideas. What they accepted, they did sodeliberately because the new had to complement something already existingwithin the receiving/accepting society. The question is always that of whoinitiated the process. I shall explore the situation in the Mediterraneanand the Black Sea, focusing on prestige objects in local societies as wellas Greek features in the architecture of local settlements, sculpture.

Gocha Tsetskhladze is a Classical Archaeologist with two doctorates
(Moscow and Oxford). He is a specialist in the archaeology of the
Mediterranean, Anatolia and the Black Sea in the Archaic and Classical
periods, Greek colonisation, the relationship between Greeks and locals,
etc. He has published over 250 articles, chapters and books. He is founder
and editor-in-chief of the journal Ancient West & East and its monograph
supplement, Colloquia Antiqua. He has excavated extensively around the
Black Sea and is now Director of the University of Melbourne Excavations
at Pessinus in Central Anatolia.